The Your Move Jam posed a challenge: Design a "Powered by the Apocalypse" (a.k.a. "PbtA") game with only a single move. I'd been sitting on an idea for just such a game for a long time: Gauge, a diceless, token-based game about surviving in hostile environments with tight resources. I'd been sitting on it because … Continue reading Gauge: A diceless RPG about survival
I found out about the One Hit Point jam pretty late, but I loved the concept: All characters in your game must only have one hit point, and must never gain any more. So, with only a few hours here and there to whip something together, I created a very brief game about very brief … Continue reading Hit + Die: A 1 page, 1 HP RPG
After five months of playtesting, I'm finally calling Grave (more or less) done. This game offers a minimalist D&D-inspired rule set for soulslike fantasy adventures, built on Ben Milton's tried-and-true Knave. Like Knave, it only offers hints of an implied setting, so it works best when paired with "Old School Renaissance" (OSR) adventure modules and … Continue reading Grave 1.0 release notes & alternate rules
My second game jam submission in a week (and, well, ever) is Aetherway, for the delightful Goon Jam featuring hacks of Nate Treme's Tunnel Goons . It's meant to be a companion and/or conversion for Troika!, but I think it's potentially useful to anybody who would like d66 tables of strange travelers and otherworldly portals—and … Continue reading Aetherway: Tunnel Goons meets Troika!
I submitted something to a game jam for the first time this week: Advanced Let's Play Pretend 2nd Edition, for OnRamp Jam by Paul Beakley of The Indie Game Reading Club. The purpose of the jam was to provide a small game—no more than two sides of a page in length—that experienced GMs could use … Continue reading Advanced Let’s Play Pretend 2nd Edition
Mind control is tricky business. As a player in a D&D-descended game, you understand that you have limited control over the world at large, but you are the final arbiter on how your character thinks and acts. Losing control of your character's behavior is effectively being denied the right to actually play the game. No … Continue reading This giant, immortal bug wizard seems like an OK dude
As we've established, I can't stop hacking Numenera. The more I try to figure out how to mine the parts I like best, though, the more I feel like the most sensible thing is not to house rule the Cypher System—it will always been too fiddly for my purposes—but to run some other game entirely, … Continue reading Whitehacking Numenera
